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FCC Requires Backup Power For 210K Cell Towers
1sockchuck alerts us to an article in Data Center Knowledge that explores ramifications from the FCC's decision a couple of months back to require backup power for cell sites and other parts of the telecom infrastructure. The new rule was prompted by wireless outages during Hurricane Katrina. There are more than 210,000 cell towers in the US, as well as 20,000 telecom central offices that will also need generators or batteries. Municipalities are bracing for disputes as carriers try to add generators or batteries to cell sites on rooftops or water towers. The rules will further boost demand in the market for generators, where there are already lengthy delivery backlogs for some models.
Yikes!
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I know a guy, he can get you all the batteries you want, alike the brade of your choice, at 1/5 the price!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Millions of people will be able to call each other to ask "is your power out too?"
cat * >> sig
The backup generators will probably not be very effective in preventing outages during natural disasters. Consider New Orleans: how many of generators can work while submerged underwater? Or California, where should an earthquake knock out the original power to a tower, it is just as likely to knock out the generator.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
Maybe self powering solar paneled towers might be better. You'd be helping the environment as well as providing backup. And the height of these towers are perfect for a wind turbine + battery installation as well.
Even if it's not perfectly reliable, such a tower could be connected to the grid, and in the event of emergency, it'll be at the very least, intermittent,which is enough for some traffic to flow out for a very long time. With a battery/generator, you'd only have power, while reliable, for a limited amount of time.
During the east coast power failure a couple of years back, cell phones were useless because the towers were dead. Landlines worked just fine. I've always felt that the cell companies weren't doing enough to build out their infrastructure to support big events. They'd just have enough in place to provide average service.
Ma Bell and the landline service has been built out for generations and it shows.
I find it hard to believe that this is going to be an issue. The batteries don't have to be up on the roof, or on top of the water tower to be effective. Yes, the closer the better, but I doubt there will be more than a handful of places where there's no other place for them.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
All CDMA systems have power backup facilities built into their equipment. ALL of them have battery power to some degree, and have interfaces for generators to be connected to them as well.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I am a ham radio operator and concern myself with disaster preparedness. With POTS (plain old telephone system) everyone is guaranteed their own connection, complete with line backup power so you can use the phone even if the power's out. Sometimes the switches overload and "all circuits are busy" but in most situations it's worked pretty well for the last century.
I worry about the trend to move to cell phones. We rely on both our cell phone's battery and the cell tower to stay powered. We also rely on available frequencies to use the tower. In Katrina and recently the San Diego fires, everyone immediately got on their cell phones and jammed all of the towers. Is there enough redundancy, power, and capacity to handle the next disaster? I don't think we should wait for the next hurricane to prove if cell towers can handle an emergency.
I am currently in a power outage with NO Cellular Service (of any type)! This actually *sucks* and is inexcusable (considering what I pay!)
Those Damn Ice Storms here in the Central US (today and yesterday). (Generators/UPS are so so nice!)
Had Cell Service (with AT&T/Cingular) for about 3 hours following the outage (currently the largest single outage in my state's history)... but apparently the cell-site UPS batteries drained and the tower site did not have a generator...
I am going to ask for a prorated refund for my service plan (and they will legally HAVE TO give me that discount for my contracted service being out).
If EVERYONE called up their service providers and asked specifically for their prorated discount for service being out (on that given day)... I bet they would invest in UPS/Generator combos at the cell tower sites... -Z
EASY PICKINGS? In Texas and the nearby states like OK, KS, NM, etc, there are zillions of cell towers in the middle of nowhere. What an opportunity for thieves if these all had little generators nearby. I hope a better paradigm that what I describe is used.
NEW CASH COW? Its bad enough in Dallas where miles lights were out along the divided highways in the Summer of 2006 because thieves pulled out the connecting. This was bad in the summer of 2006 and its better now since openings have been welded shut. I can see generators being the new cash cow for thieves.
Thanks
Jim
Comment removed based on user account deletion
24 hours is sufficent to cover for brief, minor outages. It is not enough to cover for anything close to a natural disaster where many sites lose power and there are not enough resources to fix them all in 24 hours.
Here in New Zealand, all our telecom has 24 hour battery backup but it is sized "just right". Last year we lost power for approx 40 hours due to a severe snow storm. The phones lasted for appeox 25 hours.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Since power and generators in particular are in very short supply after a disaster such as a major hurricane, what is going to prevent people from just looting the generators for their own needs? Seems to me they would be high priority targets. Hey need some way to watch that new flat panel
If the power was knocked out to a cell phone tower due to a natural disaster, wouldn't the phone lines/trunk also be knocked out? So with battery back ups we'll have a bunch of towers broadcasting with no lines to call out!
They should require some kind of ambient power generation also to be included. Solar cells are well understood perhaps but IIRC they do not have long lifetimes. So either some special long-lifetime solar cell, or something that uses environmental (humidity, electrostatic charge, temperature, gas, wind, etc.) gradients. It only has to be able to provide a very short window of time, perhaps only 30 min. per day, in which it can operate without any input from the power grid. If such a thing exists/can be developed it could be installed in really distant palces without infrastructure too, on an ad-hoc networking basis. I would feel a lot safer especially this would be useful for massive hurricaines and earthquakes, etc. I would not feel so safe if the backup batteries they talk about will run down in a few days, that's not enough time to restore all infrastructure as we have seen.
An option to receive microwave power from planes or from orbit would also be a very smart thing, a tiny rectenna (or just top surface of the battery) ought to do it.
Gensets that would be 'enterprise class' are big monolithic machines that are most likely not walking away unless equally big machinery is brought in to move them off the concrete pads they are bolted down to.
Its not like its some 1KW 'garage' special we're talking about here.
Furthermore if it did prove to be a problem stick, a renewable source like solar or a wind turbine up on the tower where permissible to lower the risk of theft so only the truly desperate would partake
Bought the ticket, taking the ride.
The cell towers in my area already have some kind of power backup. I think that's been the norm for a while now.
Plus, any disaster of hurricane katrina's level will undoubtedly overtax the network bandwidth anyway and most calls will fail.
You're in a power outage posting to slashdot? Do you have a backup satalite link and generator just in case you lose internet for a few hours?
Hey, a geek has to have his priorities!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
As an Australian who recently cam through a major cyclone (Larry), I too am surprised to learn that Americans were installing mobile phone sites _without_ backup power. If anyone is complaining about the cost to retrofit, then go complain to the person who installed the site without it in the first place!! (Oh, that was you too? Poor little idiot.)
There was major problems with the telephone systems. The landline systems had 24 hour battery backups, but beyond that, they had to rely on workers delivering gen sets to recharge the batteries. Delivery of these was made difficult by flooding in many cases.
There were some cellphone sites out, and, with the large amount of relief work going on, the remaining ones were often congested. (CDMA and GSM were working then).
All told, though, everything was done very well by all concerned. No doubt lessons were learned, but, well, lets go deliver a good, solid larting to anyone who decided _not_ to provide backup power to all telecoms stuff!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
ALL cell towers operate usually on two different power sources, plus a generator as a backup.
...
Needing a law to require something so obvious as a backup power source is sad, but true
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It seems unfair that the FCC gets to tell corporations what to do. Not that a huge fan of large corporations, but I still don't think that the FCC should have that kind of control. If a cell service provider thinks that it's valuable to have backup power, then they will provide backup power themselves.
Seek and ye shall find.
Having gone through pager/cellular outages in the almost-all-California almost-all-day power outage a few years back as well as through rolling blackouts I applaud this effort. It's even more important as more and more people go wireless only. But it's gonna hoit...
There are already plenty of hand-wringers who try to block any cell site due to "harmful radiation". Now that same group is going to be heading to city hall to complain about noisy/polluting/etc. generators and stacks of batteries full of lead and sulphuric acid.
And to some extent they will have a point. Emergency generators need regular testing - some critical units have weekly test requirements. It might fly in the office complex or industrial area but there are plenty of cell towers hidden in church steeples and residential areas. Others are in the middle of the desert. And no matter where they are, they will need to be regularly tested, maintained and fueled. For some sites like those covering desert areas, solar may prove attractive. In other cases it may be cheaper to just rip out the site if it only provides coverage in some desolate spot.
And where you might get away with a small/medium cabinet for your equipment, now you need to have more space for batteries and easy access for regular replacement or, alternately, a site for a generator, noise enclosure, fuel tank, and access for refuling and maintenance. Rent costs are likely to rise.
It's all going to be passed on to us users anyway. But I would far prefer to pay a tad more for reliability than for cool wallpaper and rad ringtones. Guess I'm getting old.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
As a Mississippi resident who came through Katrina, I fully understand the necessity of a working system of cell towers, but it's not just power that's important in an emergency- you also need adequate bandwidth/capacity. Our power was only out for 1-4 days after the storm (depending on the neighborhood), but it was a full two weeks before you could actually dial out and get something other than a "network busy" message.
Admittedly, landlines were no better, but cell service here was already known for it's limited capacity and poor coverage. It didn't help that on top of all the coordination of emergency and relief efforts, everybody had to continually tie up the circuits to let all the relatives know how they were doing.
Even the day before the storm hit, I remember that the cell lines were jammed beyond capacity... nobody could make or receive calls. Landlines worked perfectly fine.
My job requires me to spring into action when disaster strikes. On my way to an unfamiliar site, I was completely lost due to a closed road. Power was off so long the battery backup at the cell tower failed. Luckily, I was able to get there after a whole lot of driving in circles.
We're putting too many eggs in one basket. That's one of the reasons why I'm an amateur radio operator (ham). If I had my license during the aforementioned problem, I could have easily gotten the other engineer on the airwaves because he's a ham as well.
What's interesting is that there's a HUGE (100kw or bigger) generator about 50 feet from this cell tower which powers the Comcast cable headend (the place that distributes cable to the entire metro area). Maybe they'd finally be able to working something out if the battery issue is pushed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, but power and communication lines are often buried in the upper Midwest due to the incredible ice storms we get. Those that aren't have many extra poles/unit length to hold them up for exactly this reason. His phone/cable lines are probably live, but the power lines aren't.
To provide solar power to a cell site would require several hundred square feet of space to mount the panels. Sizing a solar power system for infrastructure requires planning for when the amount of sun is at the minimum (approx 2 hours during wintertime at northern latitudes). A aolar system must put a full charge on the battery system to account for charging losses, battery inefficiency, and the continual demand of the load. To match up to a solar power system you need a very significant battery string (when I do system calculations I assume that the system can go for three days without sun). Mounting a wind turbine on a cell tower is problematic too. An antenna structure has a loading (ANSI 222 (f or g)) that has to account for ice, maximum wind and the surface area of the tower, feedline, antennas, etc... A wind turbine adds ALOT of loading to a structure. I suspect that 90% of the cell towers out there right now could not pass the structural analysis under ANSI.
Tisha Hayes
Hey, I feel for you. Back in `93 (I think, don't quote me), we had an ice storm hit our area pretty hard. Some people were without power for over 2 weeks. And the cell phones were useless after the first couple of hours when the batteries at the towers went dead. Only the police, fire and utilities had any radio communications at the time because they had planned their systems for just this type of emergency.
Oh, some cell sites had generators, but the cell co.'s had assumed they could just grab a gas can at the local hardware store and buy some gas to refill the generators until the utility hooked them back up.
Which would have been fine if the utility didn't have 100K other customers who also needed to be hooked back up. Not to mention that the utility couldn't even get power to their own substations because of all the downed trees and lines. Heck, most roads were impassable because of downed limbs.
And none of the stores in the area that sold gas cans could take checks or credit cards because they didn't have power, cash sales only! And most banks and ATMs were offline as well. As were all the gas stations within a 100 mile radius. It was a mess. Widespread power outages are a bitch. I was fortunate as my power was only out for about 10 hours. We dug out the candles and my kerosene garage heater for the duration.
A co-worker drove 4 hours round-trip to his father-in-law's place just to borrow a generator. When he got home he discovered there wasn't a gas can to be bought nor a gas station open to sell him gas. His borrowed generator was useless. We still give him a hard time at work about that one. There were even some fist fights at the few places that had generators for sale and a couple of stores were gouging people heavily to buy them. Hard times seem to bring out the worst in some people.
Last spring after a storm I was without power for over half a day. I went out and bought a generator the next day but have never had to use it.
Hmm, just checked the weather service at http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/full_loop.php. Looks like that storm might make it this far after all. I think I'll go fill up both my 5 gallon gas cans.
Good luck to everyone in the storm's path! Hope it doesn't hit you!
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
What about it?
If every person in the US turned on everything electric in their house, the grid would be brought to it's knees.
If every person in the US tried to fill up their car at once, the fuel industry would be brought to it's knees.
If every person in the US tried to fly at once, the airline industry would be brought to it's knees.
If every person in the US hit slashdot at once, slashdot would be brought to it's knees.
You can't build infrastructure to handle everyone at once, all the time. It just doesn't make sense.
Gone!
No, but with a computer-controlled system like the cellular network it would be perfectly possible to prioritize traffic in an emergency. It surprises me that they apparently can't do that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Aww,,, Sniff, sniff. I co-manage 5 remote 2-way radio sites and, due to increased power needs, we have to upgrade the backup generator at one of our sites. Our primary electrical contractor quoted $38,000 for a COMPLETE installation: 35KW generator, transfer switch and installation.
And that's for ONE generator. The cellular folks will be buying them by the trainload and should be able to weasel a significant discount.
More crap! The electrical connections are the simplest part of the installation. Our contractor installs full-site transfer switches. They connect between the power meter and the disconnect switch or main fuse box. Two electricians do that part in under a day. The generator itself, OTOH, can take up to a week depending if there is a concrete base to be poured, fuel tank and EPA issues. Still, there's nothing new enough here to require "innovation".
microturbines .. like those produced by Capstone Microturbine (CPST) amazing tech would be perfect.
How many KVA does a typical cellsite(single provider) need? I'm wondering what sized generators are going to be harder to get. We recently had an almost 90 day wait for our 100KVA set, but I assume that's much larger than a cellsite needs.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The fuel industry would be celebrating. That just means that they can raise the price of gas to $79 a gallon. This in turn would probably prevent a lot of people from filling up their cars...
Somehow, I don't think that enough people would be able to get through security to adversely affect the airlines. It's more likely that the price of gas from the previous scenario would have a worse affect on the industry.
Well, you're right.
For the record, cell service just came back up... well, actually it didn't ...it now says 'network busy'. Probably a puny mobile cell site trailer... have to go look for it in the morning.
/.
Speaking of which, I have been looking around but I still don't see that Aussie-accented-guy standing in any ponds or holes around here touting the new 'AT&T Wireless Broadband Network'...
Sure, what else to do after an Ice storm (after getting your power working).. but Post on
I have remarkably reliable Cable Internet/Digital Cable service and it is *always* working.
My Cable provider's nodes have UPS battery boxes w/Natural Gas generators attached to each fiber/analog node breakout box (sitting beside it).
One of these nodes happens to be located 30 feet from my house in my yard's edge. (I know this because I lifted off its plastic cover to see what the hell I have been mowing around...) I truly enjoy the low latency (LPB) of having my cable provider's fiber-to-coax node so close to my home. (And the DOCSIS loop sharing, etc.. is not an issue (yet) in my neighborhood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS)
And yes, I have a decent 5kw generator and several UPS' of my own doing frequent 'line conditioning' operations on the sags and spikes of the generator's voltage regulators being slow. Extension cords abound. (Apparently some ice covered trees took out the feed lines going to the sub-station (which is one block away).. according to my power utility provider. That will probably take days to fix... Crews have been called in from other states to 'help'...
Let's just say that I now know where that extra money went when I purchased one of these... http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SUA1000XL
It may only be 1000VA, but it has a monster battery and is very responsive to line conditions (plus has lots of indicator lights on the front that finally I get to see in action)... -Z
I have a Matrix 5000 with 4 batteries about the size of a large truck battery that came out of our old DR site when we upgraded the UPS there. I'm planning to have it wired in by an electrician to run my blower, sump and fridge during such emergencies. It's always either an ice storm (thus the blower for heat) or a hell of a thunderstorm (thus the sump) that takes out power around here for any length of time. I figure that it will power 2 of the 3 for a day or so as long as I don't open the fridge during the outage.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"You're in a power outage posting to slashdot? Do you have a backup satalite link and generator just in case you lose internet for a few hours?"
Cripes. Does this really need to even be asked? He could simply be at a friend's house or at the library or something. Maybe he took his laptop to Starbucks and logged on there. Maybe he has a generator.
Use your brain, yeesh.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
or were forced to pick one standard like in the rest of the world, you wouldn't need 5+ masts in one place, each with it's own backup, all to support all the different proprietary standards.
Where's that invisible hand of the free market that is supposed to magically make our disjointed, antiquated mobile system more efficient than the rest of the world's?
Mod me down for being a commie bastard.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:cwTrqX9BMl8J:www.cse.umkc.edu/~beardc/WorkSummary.pdf+GSM+emergency+priority+traffic&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Wireless Priority Services
- Became a high priority after September 11, 2001.
Extension of the U.S. wireline GETS system that had been around for many years.
Used the same call queuing approach.
Only available from GSM providers
- Only GSM has priority call identifiers.
From http://aboutus.vzw.com/bestnetwork/network_facts.html:
The Verizon Wireless network is built for reliability in emergencies, with battery back-up power at all facilities and for additional reliability, generators installed at all switching facilities, and many cell site locations. The company also owns a fleet of portable generators that can be deployed to provide emergency power during extended power outages to those cell sites without permanent generators.So, let's see, it sounds like for...
...central offices? Yup, batteries already there.
...remote switches? Yup, they've got batteries and generators.
...cell sites? Yup, they've got batteries, and some have generators as well.
A business colleague I once worked with was *given* a brand new Matrix 5000 by APC for writing an actually true Kudos real-life-APC's-UPS-saved-my-IT-ass letter to APC following another major Ice Storm back in '01. (I think those matrix 5000 batteries may actually be heavier than car batteries.) I am looking forward to the UPS industry offering LiON or LiPO batteries (at least to those of us who actually have to install/move the darn things...) Of course we all remember this: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=109923
And Yes, that's exactly what my generator is doing at this moment... powering the blower and thermostat on my *gas* furnace. and powering my APC UPS et al. (too bad NG is so high!) I think your Matrix 5000 would be a very good standard item for most homes (plus an automatic transfer switch and generator tie-in)... but just like burglar alarms in homes, people don't change the batteries.
Maybe he has a generator.
Many people have a generator that they never consider using. It's called a car. Unlike a standby generator, it is most likely have been recently serviced, has a working battery, fresh fuel and oil, and tested in the last week. Dig out your pocket inverter, and extension cord and laptop. Fire up the car once in a while to recharge the battery.
I wanted more power than a lighter socket inverter will provide so I installed a trunk mount inverter.
I have a Prius. It takes care of shutting down the engine when the traction battery is charged and restarting it when it is drawn down. I use that at my advantage. My Prius is my emergency genertator. I picked up one of these from Costco and trunk mounted it.
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11240887&whse=BC&Ne=4000000&eCat=BC|3960|21273|59839&N=4018442&Mo=5&pos=8&No=3&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&cat=59839&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&lang=en-US&Sp=C&ec=BC-EC10613-Cat21269&topnav=
It's a bargin at under $70.00 I have used it camping and for emergencies. I use about 1/4 tank of gas/weekend. It beats filling a portable noisy generator every 3-8 hours.
It has enough surge capacity to start my fridge as well as run a few CF lights, and my computer. In using the car for emergency power, it typicaly runs for about 5 minutes, then it shuts down for about 1/2 hour and then repeats the cycle.
The truth shall set you free!
Maybe he lives in the woods. When I lived with my parents, we had a 10KW generator on a concrete slab out back. If we didn't have it, there's no water and no heat - doesn't matter that usually the cable and phone still works. Once it kicks on, it restarts the cable modem, so even though it's black all around for miles, we're still connected.
:(
Pretty convenient, it'd be nice to have it here, where when some asshole hits one of the curbside transformers and the power goes out for 6 hours we don't have internet!
i was under the impression that this was already required. this came up back in 2003 when the entire northeast went dark for several hours. we did have cell service for the entire outage, although the system was overloaded with calls for most of it. does anyone know if new york state already has this type of law in place?
You people who don't have your plane tickets already are out of luck, but the airlines won't melt down. People who find thin Sn headgear fashionable should take note
After having just gone through a 2 day power outage after a strong wind storm I can say that it sucked not having any ability to contact anyone on my cell phone.
I used to work (splicer before the CT days) for Michigan Bell (then Ameritech and then SBC). Central Offices have had battery and generator backup for years (for LECs though, not sure about CLECs). I've also done quite a bit of telecomms work here in Australia too and every exchange I have been in has battery backup as well as an on site generator. I did not RTFA but the description indicates that this is not the case. Worth mentioning though.
I am going to ask for a prorated refund for my service plan (and they will legally HAVE TO give me that discount for my contracted service being out).
Yeah right. Go read your contract again. They don't guaranty service. I'm sure the contract makes allowance for acts of God (eg weather), war, strikes, insurrection, vandalism, radio interference, concrete buildings, etc, etc.
Now, they might give you a refund as a goodwill gesture, but I think the law is firmly on their side.
After all, you said this is "the largest single outage in my state's history". Chill out dude.
If you want a reliable phone, get a POTS landline.
In Europe, well in Italy at least, they already have this as mandatory!
This is why all that -48VDC thing in telco.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I have serviced Verizon Cell Towers throughout the Midwest (500+) and they all had backup power sources attached to their towers. The backup sources depended on location, but a great majority of them included massive batteries along with generators.
If I turned on everything electric in my house my primary breaker would blow and I'd be without power.
I think they had the requirement removed from landline exchanges so they could move to IPV6
Regarding hurricane Katrina:
I work for a large cell carrier. We had backup power to every single cell in the area. In fact, after the hurricane we were doing pretty well, though some of the towers were taken out by debris. Only a couple were actually submerged. We lost a few trunk lines, but for the most part the system was working.
The problem was we didn't have any way to get gas to the generators. The roads were impassible, and based on news reports we were reluctant to send crews in to the sites we could reach for security reasons. So after a couple days the cell sites started going offline one at a time as the generators ran out of power.
As far as I know every one of our sites, in the entire country, already has a couple days worth of backup power.
There are also water powered sump pumps available if you are in a municipality with city water. Used to have a fridge that was powered by natural gas, too...
For us carnivores, "Sucking the marrow out of life" isn't a transcendentalist philosophy but a practical instruction.
Propane. I see a lot of big propane generators at farms, fairly common now along with diesel, but propane lasts indefinitely and doesn't go bad. And most of the phone company huts use propane generators now for backups (at least that is what I see around my state). A good industrial engine and propane is about as reliable as diesel. Tradeoffs mostly. Diesel engines are more robust, but much more expensive. Diesel has to be used and replaced often,even with additional treatments like anti gel and anti microbial, propane doesn't, meaning you could get the propane now at cheap prices (relatively speaking) and ten years from now it would still be good fuel.
With that said we have three large diesel gensets to keep the farm running here in case of power outtage,(and they certainly get used for that as well, quite often) but joe farmer boss said if he was building the farm today he'd use propane. The last large poultry farm I worked on used propane generators though (nissan engines actually). We're not a massive data center or cell phone company, but as farms around here go we are the largest. We store several thousand gallons of diesel in tanks, but have well over 100,000 gallons of propane in huge tanks at any one time.
So I agree with you in a sense, diesels are by far just more robust and longer running engines, but given how infrequently the cell towers would have to be running purely on generators I think propane powered generators and large storage tanks and some solar panels to keep the starter batteries charged constantly (as an independent backup) along with periodic test running might be more useful and come in a lot cheaper in terms of dollars and still be able to do the job as required, probably two for one or better there in cost.
This FCC rule only requires towers have 8 hour capacity anyhow, so you're only going to see at most 3X the run time over your current situation.
The article talks a lot about diesel generators--nothing about natural gas generators, solar cells, wind turbines, etc.--so you can pretty safely assume cell towers will have just enough fuel to run for 8 hours before shutting down, and remain that way until power is restored.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Those things are great! Last for freaking decades. In ye olden days of alternative energy they were the scrounged batteries of choice (do they still sell them used at scrap prices?) if you could get them*. Old beat on and used they were a better deal than brand new from other sources.
*I've heard submarine batteries were nice too, but I have never seen or used them myself. With that said, whenever my personal storage batts need replacing now I would probably go with an electric forklift battery pack.
VoIP reliability and uptime are orders of magnitude worse than POTS. And the cable company has no uptime commitment or time to fix standard AT ALL. On Saturday my cable was out for 11hrs. If I needed that VoIP line I'd be screwed.
Electromechanical Batteries or EMB or Flywheel Batteries by their old name. These have the highest power density of any energy storage system. They are so reliable they can be buried or sent into space. They can hole huge amounts of power. They can be recharged very quickly. They do not burst into fire. They are not hazardous.
Specific Power EMB (5-10 kW/kg) Lead Acid (0.1-0.5 kW/kg)
Energy Recovery EMB (90%-95%) Lead Acid (60%-70%)
Specific Energy EMB (100 Wh/kg) Lead Acid (30-35 Wh/kg)
Service Lifetime EMB (>10 years) Lead Acid (3-5 years)
Self Discharge Time EMB (Weeks to months) Lead Acid (variable)
Hazardous Chemicals EMB (none) Lead Acid (Lead, Sulfur, & Acid)
"A new look at an Old Idea the Electromechanical Battery" Science and Technology Review April 1996 by
Dangerous EMB (possibly in massive physical impact) Lead Acid (High fire danger)
Caterpillar and Beacon power already sell off the shelf UPS based on EMB for anything up to a whole grid substation. These are the answer to balancing the output of solar and wind power as well, far better than ice batteries or lead acid. These are the answer to solving our reliability problems with the national power grid (if each substation could self power for even a few 1/10s of a second you can reroute the grid. In fact these are even a possible answer to batteries for cars thanks to new fiber based flywheels instead of steel. There is literally no sound reason to use Lead acid to backup a data center, a telephone switch, or a cell tower anymore.
The FCC should demand that the power backup meets a certain level of reliability and power density within a top percentile of the most cost effective solution so that people don't use old outdated technology just because it is a system that they are accustomed to.
Why not install batteries and use them to do the sort of grid balancing trick that we used to have to with electric cars?
That's exactly how cellular networks are designed. Do you know why? MONEY. Cell providers build just enough capacity in certain areas to get as much money as they can while providing adequate service. Their delivered quality of service is just good enough to not drive people to other carriers. Their networks get completely saturated during emergencies like 9/11? Of course, because they never intended for them to be used by everyone at the same time. You say this likes it's a bad thing. If the mobile phone carriers built the capacity to support an event like 9/11, it would cost a metric crapload, and 99% of the time that capacity would sit unused. But we'd all share the costs in increased rates and charges and the rate increase would be substantial. Do you really want to pay for that? I'd rather not... This issue with the backup power is similar. This is going to cost a ton of money and be absurdly inefficient. It will buy us 8 hours before the transmitter sites run out of gas and shut down. Then teams will have to arrive and refuel them. In general these wireless carriers already have made disaster preparations and pre-stage equipment and personnel to respond to outages. During Katrina, the teams from the telecom providers were not permitted access to the disaster zone, but they were standing by with backup power generators and repair crews. This backup power mandate doesn't really buy us much, but it is sure going to cost us...
As far as I know every one of our sites, in the entire country, already has a couple days worth of backup power.
I'm not sure who you work for, but I can guarantee you that none of the big wireless carriers is currently in compliance with the 8-hour backup power requirement for transmitter sites, much less having several days worth of fuel. The national wireless carriers all believe that compliance would be extremely difficult and expensive and are currently in the process of appealing this order in the DC Circuit through their industry association (CTIA). If your cell sites stayed up for several days, that was likely due to specific pre-hurricane preparations. Kudos on that.
BTW, the reason that the refueling crews could not reach the equipment was not so much that the roads were impassible. It was a credentialing problem. The national guard had closed off the disaster area and weren't letting anyone in, including telecom fueling and repair crews. It took days to get the mess straightened out.
That's why I said an independent backup. I tell you, I've seen automatic generators not start before,despite being "plugged in", but my batteries attached to solar panels always "just work" and stay in tip top shape, mostly because I think the other devices associated with solar panels (charge controllers and desulphators primarily) are of such good a quality. With a genset, having three ways to keep the starter batteries charged is a good deal, grid supplied trickle/float/smart charger, the alternator on the engine itself once it is running, and I would add a panel or two and a charge controller, just for redundancy and backup insurance. Perhaps on another starter battery attached through an isolator circuit and transfer switch in case the primary fails for some reason.
I'm a *big* fan of solar, having used it so much and seeing how solid it is. IMO, the government needs to do a manhattan project scale R&D effort with solar, not a joke level, a real level,, serious multiple billions, because I think "practical fusion power" is just a winner. The other fusion power projects are decades away and are costing tons of cash, they are extremely complex and delicate advanced rube goldberg efforts at this point (eventually might pay off but we need stuff that works now, not 50 years from now). Solar fits that bill, it works now, it really is fusion power ( I have started a one guy campaign, like with this post and others I have made to call it practical fusion power), and it is already proving that it can work day in and day out with extreme minimal maintenance all over the planet (got to love zero moving parts for example), so now we need to get economies of scale going to a much greater extent (put a ton of rust belt guys back to work, manufacturing and installing/servicing) and keep improving the efficiencies of both the panels and storage technologies-along with keeping work going on improving electric device power demands and various other conservation issues.
I think our society would be well served right now to stop wasting so much good silicon on crap like cellphones that get thrown away every year (I bet everyone here has a box full of them) and throw away music players and *forced computer upgrades from operating system bloat-age* and so on. That's the biggest problem the solar manufacturers are having now, and what is keeping prices high, they have orders up the wazoo, demand is just fantastic, but they can't get the silicon because of throw away cheap gadgets sucking it up.
I know they are working on ultra thin film and different composites and so forth for solar (like nanosolar company), but that stuff is still mostly unobtanium. Silicon based panels just work and can be built now and will produce good power for 30 years or better. the process will evolve, but we can't wait until oil cracks two hundred a barrel and so on to think about maybe using some alternatives and doing a massive decentralization of power production so we don't need to waste money on upgrading the grid infrastructure, we have to do it while it is still cheap and not an ecological and economic emergency situation. Just like with this article and backup power for the cell towers, you need your backup power plan in place and operational and in "normal-working" status *before* it is needed, not think about it once the emergency hits. That concept is valid on any scale imaginable.
I've considered this myself, even though I'd have to do the car starting myself - get a big inverter and hook it up to provide power in an outage, using the gasoline engine(and battery) in my car for power.
I'd just have to be careful not to kill my inverter, which isn't very heavy duty compared to a hybrid car's.
Heck, for ~$500 I could get a 5000 watt inverter and an extra deep cycle battery to power it, keeping my car(and it's battery) out of the cycle so I don't risk killing my starting capacity.
If I ever find the diesel pickup I'm looking for, this wouldn't be a problem - a diesel normally not only has two larger batteries but a much more capable inverter to keep the batteries charged.
I don't read AC A human right
Telecom COs have always had backup power.
Cell providers SHOULD have been required to have backup power a long time ago. I suppose the big problem here is it took the FCC this long to mandate it. It seems like a poor business decision on the part of the cellular providers not to have backup power to begin with. What's one of the first things someone picks up when the power goes out? Cell phone!
Injecting expertise and intelligence into threads here on Slashdot is simply not done, ESPECIALLY when dicussing Linux, alternative energy sources, or the Satanic nature of the current President.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Did you read Stephen King's "Cell" ?
Not going to work.
I used to keep a plain old phone around for just in case. But then I switched to Vonage, and doesn't matter much anyway. Even though my equipment is on a UPS, the Comcast stuff is not.
I'm a former employee in the network segment of Verizon Wireless. Say what you will about Verizon's customer service, coverage, or whatever, but they have a company wide policy that ALL sites have both UPS backup for short outages and on site emergency generators to last for several days. No other carrier that i'm aware of is as rigorous in implementing this. I worked at a switch site (served maybe 150 towers) and they had a generator the size of a small house and enough fuel to run it for like a week. Not going to save you forever in a Katrina situation, but when other carriers sites went out immediately, verizon was on the air still for several days, and then they brought in mobile towers to help the emergency workers. One of the best things that company did, in my opinion.
Actually, VOICE was down during the east coast power outage, but I used my cell phone (Verizon) all night to TEXT with a friend stranded at the airport! And I'm pretty sure her phone was on a different carrier, as she came from Europe.
IMHO this makes a lot of sense. Texting uses far less bandwidth than voice, so why bother backing up voice when all people will do is to call everybody else they know and bring down the system in the process anyway.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this just isn't true, and I have first-hand knowledge that it isn't true. I know of many CDMA cell sites with NO backup power (across all of the major CDMA providers, and in multiple markets), I'm damn confident this will be true for GSM/UMTS as well.
Think about it ... when was the last time you lost your hard line because of a power outage? They have been outfitting the COs with backup power by default for at least the last 30 years. The real issue here is the wireless telcos that want to play telco but not have the same service level as the real thing ;)
The problem is in a general blackout you often lose water pressure as well. During the great NE blackout my community has power because of a local generation station and a smart technician who isolated us from the grid. (Which led to LOTS of fun getting home because we were the only place for hundreds of miles with working gas stations). The Cleveland Water Commission decided that generators big enough to run the huge water pumps that power the entire metro area were too expensive and that they would go with multiple power feeds at each of the redundant pumping stations, never planning for a general grid problem. I'm not sure if they've fixed that since but I'm not using my water sump as the only emergency backup =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
maybe due to FAA starting to use cell towers to track planes....
We've been waiting months for another 2Megawatt diesel... It's amazing how back logged all generator manufacturers are. Especially for the big stuff.
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Why just Generators? Does someone on the FCC have a friend in the generator business? This sounds more like an opportunity to accelerate the photovoltaics market and production learning curve. and some of those cell towers are up on towers that could also support small scale wind power generation...they don't all have to be a colossus with 150 foot blades.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
So uh... anyone read Cell by Stephen King?
AFAICT, there wasn't any technical problem with the equipment - this quake was the type where the worst damage that happened was a bunch of pickle-jars got smashed in one grocery store. But everybody and their mom was on the phone saying "Did you just get an earthquake? Are you ok? The TV said California just fell into the ocean!" and the cellphone network can't reliably support emergency services under that kind of load. I don't know if the switchover is manual or if it's automatic (presumably load-driven.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How much power does a typical cellsite require? Is it small enough that they could use solar panels charging batteries, and would they have enough solar capacity to generate a surplus and sell some of that power back to the public power grid?
Generators for cell towers aren't that big or unstable - if there's a quake big enough to knock that out, it's likely to have trashed the cell tower as well, or the phone lines connecting to it, or whatever. The more serious problems are how much spare fuel they've got, and whether you can get to them to refill if needed. (There are exception cases - the telco office under the World Trade Center building had a couple of days worth of battery, and kept running fine until that was gone.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Eventually the outside world has caught up with us, though - as telco offices are also serving as Internet hosting centers in many cases, there's been increasing demand for power and space again.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know if there's a consistent answer, other than "your city's building and fire departments will run your ass ragged getting it approved".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What scares me is the number of people with just a cable phone or just a cell phone. I don't have cable due to the lack or reliability. Cell phones are reliable, but not anywhere the near 99% uptime with landlines.
If everyone began to demand landline quality from the cell phones, there would just be uptime guarantees in cell phone contracts(no refund unless out for 48 continuous hours, 72 hours in the case of natural disaster), and prices would increase for all of us, even if we use our cell phone as a cell phone, and not a home land line.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
That is a good idea and great news for Phoenix Broadband. They have a state of the art battery monitoring system that will make sure those batteries are ready to go when the time comes. Pity the FCC can't figure out a way to get gas to the generators...
I've gotta ask: Who the h*** builds a CO without battery and generator backup? (The CO itself should already be battery powered... -48VDC) I've never noticed in other states, but in NC I've never seen a CO without a generator sitting outside.